Mass Shootings in the United States

Century 16 movie theater in Colorado where a shooting took place in 2012.

Staff Writer: Preston Stubblefield

The United States of America is the best country in the world. When people who decide to take other people’s life’s away from them and their loved ones, it hurts every American. In the past ten years there has been about a mass shooting per year. The past two shootings, each were the worst of all time in the United States.

The Las Vegas shooting is the worst mass shooting in the United States. More than sixty people were killed, and more than four hundred people were injured. The shooter, identified by Las Vegas Police, as Stephen Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nevada, was firing from the thirty second floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel at the festival.

Officers responded to that hotel room and engaged on the suspect. There were rumors of multiple gunmen. In Orlando, forty-nine people died as well as well wounding another fifty-three people. The shooter has been identified as Omar Mateen, 29, of Port St. Lucie, Florida. This was at midnight of last year in the summer, the shooter was shot and killed by the Orlando Police.

The Virginia Tech shooting, also known as the Virginia Tech massacre, occurred on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. The shooter was Seung Hui Cho. He killed thirty-two people, making this massacre the third worst in the United States history.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed twenty children between six and seven years old, as well as six adult staff members. The incident was the deadliest mass shooting at either a high school or grade school in U.S. history and the fourth-deadliest mass shooting by a single person in U.S. history.

The shooting prompted renewed debate about gun control in the United States, including proposals for making the background-check system universal, and for new federal and state gun legislation banning the sale and manufacture of certain types of semi-automatic firearms and magazines with more than ten rounds of ammunition.

We wake up every day not knowing if we’re going to be a part of something like this. There are crazy people in this world, the scary thing is that we don’t know when something like this will happen again. My prayers go out to everyone that has lost a loved one from a terrible tragedy especially the people of Las Vegas.